Kesher Yehudi participants
Kesher Yehudi participants
Kesher Yehudi participants

kesher-yehudi-guys-1-good-picture kesher-yehudi-girls-2-20160605_213307On Shabbos parashas Vayeira, the Five Towns will celebrate a Shabbos of Achdus in honor of Kesher Yehudi, recipient of the 2016 Jerusalem Unity Prize created by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and the families of the three yeshiva students kidnapped and brutally murdered in the summer of 2014: Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Sha’ar, and Naftali Frenkel.

The Young Israel of Woodmere and Congregation Aish Kodesh of Woodmere will host presentations on Shabbos by Mrs. Tzila Schneider, the founder and director of Kesher Yehudi, and well-known author and columnist Yonason Rosenblum. Sunday morning, Mrs. Schneider and Mrs. Esther Wein of Kesher Yehudi Five Towns will speak at the home of Moshe and Chavi Schmell, followed by a short video of Kesher Yehudi’s work with pre-induction academies (mechinot) in Israel.

After the murder of her son Naftali and the two other yeshiva students, Mrs. Rachel Frenkel made a Rosh Hashanah video for Aish.com, which quickly went viral, in which she said, “We went out looking for the boys, and we found ourselves.”

She likened the 18 days of searching for the boys and the 50 days of fighting in Gaza which followed to a prolonged flash of lightning on a dark heath. “We saw that we are part of something huge, a people, a true family. That’s for real.”

Kesher Yehudi’s mission statement–bringing Jews across the religious divide together in deep relationships based on our shared heritage of Torah–is in that spirit. Since its founding in 2009, Kesher Yehudi has created 6,000 chavrusos between secular and religious Israelis. Beginning with phone learning, those chavrusos develop into something much deeper. At gatherings where phone chavrusos meet each other for the first time, they often sit for hours with their arms around one another’s shoulders.

And the feelings of closeness go both ways. Faigy, 38, of Beitar, describes her study partner: “Liat is a friend for life. I could never have dreamed of someone like her, and now I can’t imagine life without her.” Etti, a lawyer from Tel-Aviv, says of her learning, “It is fun to rediscover each time we learn that the Torah is the precious possession of every Jew. And it does not matter where you are coming from, the Torah is the glue holding us together.”

The Jerusalem Unity Prize, however, was not primarily for Kesher Yehudi’s chavrusah program, but rather for its work with the pre-induction academies. The primary advocate for Kesher Yehudi in the prize committee deliberations was former Chief of Staff General Benny Gantz.

Four years ago, Gilad Olshtein, the director of three pre-induction academies, approached Mrs. Schneider and asked her to create a program for the mechinot under his direction to deepen the Jewish identity of the participants in the one-year program, which attracts many of Israel’s most idealistic young people, a high percentage of whom go on to become officers. Since then another eight mechinot, each with between 50 to 60 young men and women, have joined the program, with another six waiting.

Once a month, the participants hear a lecture on some important Torah topic–Creation, Shabbos, the Chosen People, men and women, the meaning of loving your fellow Jew as yourself. Following the lecture, each participant then learns individually with a Kesher Yehudi volunteer for an hour. Each volunteer not only commits to maintaining contact during the month with his or her study partner, but also during their two to three years of army service. Kesher Yehudi provides special programming around the chagim, and each mechinah (academy) spends at least one Shabbos in a religious neighborhood during the year.

The eagerness of more mechinot to join every year since the program started attests to its success. Gilad Olshtein, still the most enthusiastic advocate of the program, speaks of the necessity for young people who will soon be called upon to risk their lives defending Israel to understand why the collective existence of the Jewish people is so important.

The response of the participants to even the slightest taste of Torah is often shocking. Five months ago, Rabbi Moshe Shachor, who supervises the male volunteers, received a call from a mechinah in Nazareth, which would be joining the program this year. They wanted a taste of what was involved. He quickly prepared enough material for a brief one-and-a-half-hour session in Jerusalem, and gathered a group of veteran volunteers.

Even that brief exposure to Torah learning was powerful enough that one of the participants, Ido, subsequently traveled to Jerusalem to learn with his study partner and ended up staying overnight with Rabbi Shachor and his family. Over the summer, he created a weeklong seminar for fellow graduates of his pre-induction academy, with sessions on Kuzari, Aggadatta, and Chassidut, and as he awaits induction has been going to a shiur near his home in Ramat Hasharon nearly every evening.

Kesher Yehudi is not just about changing attitudes of non-observant Jews to Torah Jews, but about changing attitudes of the mostly chareidi volunteers to non-frum Jews as well. At every session with new volunteers, Mrs. Schneider emphasizes, “If you are only here because you want to do an act of chesed with a poor unlearned Jew, nothing more, this is not the program for you.” Rather Kesher Yehudi emphasizes that any time two Jews get together, each should expect to gain from the other.

Mrs. Schneider has made a full-length film, Baboushka, about her own chavrusah, Julia, a doctor from Beersheba, who was raised in Vladivostok by a non-Jewish father and stepmother, after the death of her own Jewish mother when she was two. When Mrs. Schneider’s apartment was consumed by fire and her husband hospitalized during sheva berachos a few years ago, her chavrusah Julia was the first on the scene to help.

Last year, Mrs. Schneider was approached by Jerusalem Mayor Barkat to attempt to lower tensions between incoming young chareidi families and veteran residents in Jerusalem’s Kiryat Yovel neighborhood. Her message to a group of young chareidi families: Instead of counting the number of apartments purchased by chareidim in your building, why not view your secular neighbors as an opportunity from Heaven to connect to Jews whom you would likely have never met otherwise.

With that attitude, it is amazing what can be achieved. At the dinner following Kesher Yehudi’s receipt of the Jerusalem Unity Prize, one of the speakers was Itai Kaidan, a lawyer in Tel-Aviv’s largest law firm and self-described “sometime secular Jew.” For the last three years, Itai has been learning with Avraham Slater, like him a young lawyer, but chareidi. Together they have completed Chumash twice and Pirkei Avos with the Maharal’s commentary. Itai described the impact of the chavrusah on him: “I believe in the chavrusah project with my whole heart. The high walls that have been built here have to fade away. The Torah is the glue that binds us all–every Jew in every place he is found. The Torah doesn’t belong to one group. We all want to learn, and we all can learn. There is no reason why every Jew should not learn Torah.  Torah brings a person closer to his Creator. And I have no doubt that if every Jew will learn Torah we will be a glorious nation.”

No one could have described the mission of Kesher Yehudi better. v

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